Word Finder - paradox

definition

An apparently self-contradictory statement, which can only be true if it is false, and vice versa.

example

"This sentence is false" is a paradox.

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A counterintuitive conclusion or outcome.

example

It is an interesting paradox that drinking a lot of water can often make you feel thirsty.

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A claim that two apparently contradictory ideas are true.

example

Not having a fashion is a fashion; that's a paradox.

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A thing involving contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time.

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A person or thing having contradictory properties.

example

He is a paradox; you would not expect him in that political party.

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An unanswerable question or difficult puzzle, particularly one which leads to a deeper truth.

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A statement which is difficult to believe, or which goes against general belief.

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The use of counterintuitive or contradictory statements (paradoxes) in speech or writing.

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A state in which one is logically compelled to contradict oneself.

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The practice of giving instructions that are opposed to the therapist's actual intent, with the intention that the client will disobey or be unable to obey.

To abandon this certainty can leave us with a skeptical paradox that is genuinely depressing.

The position approaches to paradox and is not likely to be generally accepted.

The paradox of science is that its success in understanding nature has created problems for its understanding of human nature.

The paradox of individual freedom in an era of individual helplessness is a complicated issue.

He discovered the hydrostatic paradox that the downward pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel, and depends only on its height and base.

In all, he was a paradox of fashion.

Paradox, however, soon becomes stale, and fallacy wearisome.

The paradox of predication, that it seems to deny identity, or to deny difference, becomes a pons asinorum.

Aristotle had fallen into the paradox of resolving a mental act into verbal elements.

This kind of time travel creates a paradox that discourages time travel into the past.

I do recall hearing about the grandfather paradox.

To see the absurdity of the second paradox of relativity is easier than to refute it.

Herein lies the paradox which is also the deepest truth of our spiritual life.

His weakness as a writer is the too frequent striving after antithesis and paradox.

The cogency of Toland's arguments was weakened by his manifest love of paradox.

Warburton was undoubtedly a great man, but his intellect, marred by wilfulness and the passion for paradox, effected no result in any degree adequate to its power.

This principle involved the paradox that no man, knowing good, would do evil.

The result of this theory of ethics is of great value as emphasizing the importance of a systematic view of conduct, but it fails to resolve satisfactorily the great Socratic paradox that evil is the result of ignorance.

Hence came the curious paradox, that the party which started as the advocates of the rights of parliament against the incapable ministers appointed by the crown, ended by challenging the right of parliament, exercised in 399, to depose a legitimate king and substitute for him another member of the royal house.

He was strongly opposed to the prevailing French socialism of his time because of its utopianism and immorality; and, though he uttered all manner of wild paradox and vehement invective against the dominant ideas and institutions, he was remarkably free from feelings of personal hate.

The force of the paradox depends upon a blending of duty and interest in the single notion of good, a blending which was dominant in the common thought of the age.

We thus reach the paradox that the true art of living is really an " art of dying " as far as possible to mere sense, in order more fully to exist in intimate union with absolute goodness and beauty.

Both accept the paradox in the qualified sense that no one can deliberately act contrary to what appears to him good, and that perfect virtue is inseparably bound up with perfect wisdom or moral insight.

In the first place, though in Aristotle's view the most perfect well-being consists in the exercise of man's " divinest part," pure speculative reason, he keeps far from the paradox of putting forward this and nothing else as human good; so far, indeed, that the greater part of his treatise is occupied with an exposition of the inferior good which is realized in practical life when the appetitive or impulsive (semi-rational) element of the soul operates under the due regulation of reason.

Aristotle had already been led to attempt a refutation of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge; but his attempt had only shown the profound difficulty of attacking the paradox, so long as it was admitted that no one could of deliberate purpose act contrary to what seemed to him best.

This paradox is violent, but it is quite in harmony with the spirit of Stoicism; and we are more startled to find that the Epicurean sage, no less than the Stoic, is to be happy even on the rack; that his happiness, too, is unimpaired by being restricted in duration, when his mind has apprehended the natural limits of life; that, in short, Epicurus makes no less strenuous efforts than Zeno to eliminate imperfection from the conditions of human existence.

The Stoic doctrine of the worthlessness of ordinary human virtue, and the stern paradox that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely, guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter (maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike that of the Stoic) overcomes its practical exclusiveness through faith.

The former, while accepting utility as the criterion of " material goodness," had adhered to Shaftesbury's view that dispositions, not results of action, were the proper object of moral approval; at the same time, while giving to benevolence the first place in his account of personal merit, he had shrunk from the paradox of treating it as the sole virtue, and had added a rather undefined and unexplained train of qualities, - veracity, fortitude, activity, industry, sagacity, - immediately approved in various degrees by the " moral sense " or the " sense of dignity."

For three-quarters of a century, then, philosophy was at a standstill; and, when in the second decade of the 4th century the pursuit of truth was resumed, it was plain that Zeno's paradox of predication must be disposed of before the problems which had occupied the earlier thinkers - the problem of knowledge and the problem of being - could be so much as attempted.

The paradox is at the heart of things.

Where was the paradox so beloved in their books?

The Great British Cookery Paradox is evidence that supermarkets have made substantial inroads in undermining the nation's inclination to cook.

Al Carone - unlike his near namesake, Al Capone truly was a paradox wrapped in a mystery concealed behind an enigma.

They affirmed the paradox of a transcendent and immanent God by rejecting both the Stoic pantheism and the Platonic cosmic dualism mentioned above.

He ends by outdoing the paradox of Schopenhauer, concluding that Nature in itself is intelligent will, but unconscious, a sort of immanent unconscious God.

Answer 2 The first striking factor about the world of the tenth century is the paradox of what makes man good.

Another great paradox is that we tend to learn most from failure and least from success.

It's a paradox, but some vigorous forms of yoga can lead to better sleep.

When the doctor coined the term, he merely chose the phrase to reflect the paradox between the advanced capabilities with low functioning in other areas.

Among the multiple themes present in this science fiction classic, it contains the ultimate time paradox.

This endless loop continues to play out in future films, but the original paradox began with the arrival of Kyle Reese and the Terminator.

But for a tendency to paradox, his intellectual powers were of the highest order, and as a master of nervous idiomatic English he is second to Cobbett alone.

He was endowed with a strong sense of humour and a love of paradox carried to an extreme.

It is indeed the doctrine of the intractability of matter to form that lies at the base of the paradox as to the disparateness of knowledge and the real already noted.

The gathered illhumour of many years, aggravated by the confident assurance of the Hegelians, found vent at length in the introduction to his next book, where Hegel's works are described as three-quarters utter absurdity and one-quarter mere paradox - a specimen of the language in which during his subsequent career he used to advert to his three predecessors Fichte, Schelling, but above all Hegel.

Similarly, though the influence of rhetoric upon his language, as well as upon his general treatment, is clearly perceptible, he has not the perverted love of antithesis, paradox and laboured word-painting which offends us in Tacitus; and, in spite of the Venetian richness of his colouring, and the copious flow of his words, he is on the whole wonderfully natural and simple.

Once a paradox it is now commonplace, and the superabundant argument in the Letters on Toleration fatigues the modern reader.

That a revolution largely inspired by generous and humane feeling should have issued in such havoc and such crimes is a paradox which astounded spectators and still perplexes the historian.

In so far as there is any important difference between the Platonic and the Aristotelian views of human good, we may observe that the latter has substantially a closer correspondence to the positive element in the ethical teaching of Socrates, though it is presented in a far more technical and scholastic form, and involves a more distinct rejection of the fundamental Socratic paradox.

Finally, the last paradox may be interpreted as a valid refutation of the doctrine that space and time are not infinitely divisible.